Could you have started with decimals (instead of integers) from the beginning? Then it’s all the same unit, it’s just names like dollar vs penny to describe amounts.
When I say decimals I really mean “positive real numbers” that starts with some arbitrary cap, like 2.1 quadrillion.
Yeah technically like john stated the 21 million "coins" are just arbitrary software baggage. Actual bitcoin (100 millions sats) dont exist. All Bitcoin see are the 2.1 quadrillion units.
Ive searched for an anwser as to why this idea of grouping 100 million sats came to be but came up empty.
Would decimals not have worked because of computational reasons like floating point division errors?
If we, hypothetically, had a world without those errors and decimal math would be perfect, could we have infinite divisiblity without it actually adding more to the total supply?
See now youre way passed anything ive ever vetured to think or ask!
This has really been my original question (except I didn’t know bitcoin was integer based and not decimal based).
And talking about units was actually tricky
As far as I can see now, if bitcoin was decimal based and infinitely divisible, that alone would not make it inflationary instead of deflationary.
Is ^ true?
This is what I’ve been arguing with my friends about.
I think in my mind it boils down to this concept.
If there can be a way to make more representative units of value there is an inflation regardless of how you slice it, due to how integers work in the abstract sense. Your just adding more units to chase the same number of goods respectively.
This is why i believe value in and of itself its going to HAVE TO reprice itself in the future at some date so that the units we have now actually work in practice.
Perhaps this is just a difference between integer based systems and decimal based systems. In an integer system there’s no way to make it divisible without adding more integers. In a decimal based system, you can go as small as you want but it’s all the same amount of units.
One of my friends was arguing that if you can go to infinitely small amounts that’s a type of inflation and I don’t understand how he thinks that (under a decimal based system)
